Mapping the Emergent Choreography of Assistance: The Dynamics of Dyadic Peer Helping Relations in Organizations

Abstract

Using a grounded theory approach and real-time data capturing the expressions and behaviors of help givers and recipients in the course of their interactions at work, we generated a typology of interactive and episodic helping behaviors (both help giving and receiving) and applied it to explore if, when, and how the behavioral configurations of the two dyad partners changed from one exchange episode to the next. Our findings suggest that certain configurations of helping behavior often shifted in a rather predictable manner over the course of the helping exchange in response to the behavior of the dyad partner, whereas other configurations were “static,” tending to be repeated by dyad partners once they first appeared. By examining help giving and receiving as a pattern in a stream of dynamic, dyadic, and cross-episodic behaviors, and more importantly, developing a typology allowing scholars to differentiate between different types of dyadic patterns, our study provides important insights into the varying nature of helping trajectories, as well as the way in which exchange dynamics may predict change or stability in specific helping exchanges.